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Corrupt Australia presents an alternative to the politically correct channels of debate to reveal and scrutinize the skewed structure/design of modern Australian society. We also seek to encourage autonomous Australian culture which is free from the standardizing and overly materialistic clutches of globalisation and which encourages citizens to go further than simply contributing to a quantity over quality mindset and the banal and unsustainable conditions under which we may increase our love for and attainment of material mass. |
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James Gleeson {1915-} & SurrealismGleeson was spawned in Hornsby, Sydney in 1915. He studied primary school teaching at Sydney Teachers College and art at East Sydney Technical College, becoming drawn to the works of Dali, Ernst and the European Surrealists. Around the time of joining the 'Sydney Branch of the Assertively Experimental Contemporary Art Society', Gleeson became interested in the writings of Freud and Jung. Typical of surrealists, Gleeson's themes are commonly said to explore the human unconscious and its relationship with our rational or conscious states. Surrealism, as a movement in art and ideas belonging to the broader Modernist period of the early 20th century (modernism being proceeded by Romanticism and Enlightenment in turn) undertook to transfer over to art theories popularized by the psychologist Sigmund Freud, which were themselves in some form actually anticipated by Nietzsche's writings on the underlying human will to power, and which potentially downgrade, according to the Surrealists, the primacy of our rational faculties.
From a slightly different and philosophical-historical perspective, Surrealist art is another manifestation of our long held tendency to doubt the objectivity of what are today held to be our infallible tools for grasping what is 'real', i.e., our senses. Doubt regarding the objectivity of these most academically came to the attention of Modern Europe through the philosophical works of Immanual Kant and subsequent German Idealists, but these thinkers were by no means the first to tackle the subject. Plato and many religions preceded them.
With the German Idealists, 'Idealism' did not designate a dedication to any moral nor heroic ambition but rather to two, both metaphysical and epistemological, points. Firstly: the possibility that our minds do not grasp reality in itself but rather only representations of reality which may or may not correspond to reality objectively (i.e. may not correspond to reality as reality is, in-itself, separate from our perception of it). This idea can be demonstrated simplistically by putting forward the case that what we experience as the colour red really does not exist in the so-called 'red' objects themselves, but only in our minds as the subjective result of our optical nerve reacting in a certain way with the certain wavelength of light that 'red' objects reflect, to produce a certain (red) image in our consciousness or in that part of our mind which deals with the representation we depend on live. This scepticism has often been extended to claims, of varying degree and plausibility, that the underlying laws or invisible principles (i.e. of Newtons) with which nature or reality is organised are really, or merely, laws embedded into our understanding rather than into nature itself, and that our (now subjective) representations of reality, while organised by these principles, therefore do not necessarily correspond to the 'chaotic flux', or what have you, of nature as it really might be in-itself, possibly devoid of such ordering principles.
Secondly: German idealists, borrowing from eastern philosophy to some degree, posited the slightly different theory that reality itself is simply one big idea or interplay of mental entities or thoughts rather than of concrete material entities or objects, and that we ourselves are but mere thoughts or hypotheses of this mental reality (or 'over mind'). What is known as Hegel's dialectic method is an influential example of one instance of this idea. Another is Schopenhauer's conception of the world as 'will and idea' and to some degree Nietzsche's more personal-based notion of humans existing simply as the players in a big arena subject wholly to their will to power, this 'will' being the fundamental driving force behind all human action and also thought (including rational thought, which thus turns out being wholly determined and thus can be downgraded from being considered as a free and hegemonic faculty to being simply at the whim of our will to power or 'survival' or 'life' force). As for Gleeson, it is the first of these stances on Idealism, in the two aforementioned philosophical senses, that his quote at the opening of this essay alludes to, and the influence of this sort of thinking can be seen in those of his works which hint at the 'otherness' of being which possibly lies 'behind' our experience of life, or in the same works which at least stand as wake-up-calls and metaphors for the sheer mystery of existence that we at all times live with but which we moderns conveniently ignore and cover up with the increasingly drone-like and mundanely standardized nature of day-to-day life or which we have become too desensitised to or accepting of, like a constant stimulus or situation which soon becomes ignored due to familiarity.
The second stance seems not to have been neglected either though: Worshipping the vague idea that the cause of all our thinking and action is some sort of underlying or unconscious driving force or will, Gleeson, seemingly along with the Surrealist movement in general, wants to let this force express itself through art "in the absence of conscious moral or aesthetic self-censorship". It is obvious that Gleeson's works do not bear witness to a lack of standards, but rather to less interest in normal depictions of form as opposed to more 'normal' styles of art, representing a Dionysian-like interest in the human being's drive to simply create and expend its energy un-hindered by too many unnecessary impositions.
In the end, it is the place of visionaries like Gleeson to hint at the uncertainty that will forever stem from the facade or at least the boundaries of human perception, but also to manipulate in the surreal fashion the appearances that we do possess of our only reality, and to "stimulate the fantasy of mortals" to borrow a quote from Varg Vikernes. As with the musician, who's craft could be labelled surreal in many ways, great Surrealists like Gleeson twist and distort every-day representations (i.e. pieces of sense data) to form new organisations/structures of sense data, expressing the part of either our consciousness or unconsciousness (I'll leave that up to you) standing in awe of a universe that by the very scale of its vastness appears surreal to us, and which continues on in its ways indifferently to our relatively petty and slight individual concerns.
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Think of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes! - Henry Lawson |
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(c)2008 Corrupt AU |
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